"Egskews me, gentlemen" (with a marked emphasis on the "me"). "Egskews me for intrewding on yewr private deliberations. But I had a leetle proposition to make to one of yew gentlemen, an' I reckoned thet yew wouldn't object to me droppin' in on yew t' talk it over."
"Certainly not, General Leatherbottom," replied Sinclair, rising to receive him. "We are delighted to have you call. Have a seat."
Sergeant Gorman had clapped his swagger-stick under his left arm, clicked his heels together, stood at attention, and saluted as if by instinct.
"Naow, by the Jumpin' Jemina, thet's what I call neatly done. Thet's whar yew Britishers get away on us. When it comes to fightin' we kin fight. Don't take no second place to ennybody I ever met, an' I've met some few in my time. But when it comes to takin' Indians or niggers or Chinks in hand lickin' them into shape, an' teachin' them haow to fight civilized thet's whar you've got us beat to a stand-still."
He was a tall man, a very tall man, two or three inches over six feet. But he was narrow-shouldered slab-sided, and marvellously thin. His small head seemed lost in a great cavern of a sun-helmet. A long, faded, yellow moustache drooped over the hollow cheeks and angular jaws. He sat down on the proffered camp-chair, hitching a holster containing a huge .44 Colt round a little more to one side, to allow him to sit back with comfort. His legs were so long that his knees stuck up at an acute angle. When he threw one over the other, they were so thin that they seemed to twine around each other in serpentine fashion.
He accepted a pipe, lighted it, leaned forward with one sharp elbow on a sharp knee, the hand helping to hold the pipe in his mouth as he talked. The other arm was across his knee and the long, bony hand hanging down.
"Ef yew gentlemen will egskews me, I'll make my proposition, an' we'll perceed to bizness. But fust I'd like t' give yew a leetle of my auttybiography, so's yew'll understand the sityewation."
With many quaint oaths and ingenious expletives, he told how he had served as a private in a Vermont infantry regiment in the Civil War, had been wounded and taken prisoner. After the war he had drifted into the cavalry and been engaged in Indian wars in the Dakotas and Montana. He was with Benteen's companies when Custer and his three hundred were massacred by the Sioux under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Then he had turned miner, and after much experience in the Black Hills, as well as in Montana and Idaho, had drifted to Formosa and had been engaged in developing gold workings but a little distance from where they sat when the war broke out.